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Wednesday, October 8, 2014

“Great works and great folly may be indistinguishable at the outset.” That is one of the quotes from Dr. Adam Steltzner that has stuck with me from Project World 2014. He was talking about coming up with a radical idea for a Mars rover landing using the "sky crane" and his team was thinking outside the box to come up with a solution with tight tolerances and no room for failure.

I was thinking about the many things I had learned while attending the 3 day event and trying to find ways to change my approach to teaming. I belong to an organization that is dependent on our partners to help deliver to the customer. Sometimes our projects fall flat because we didn’t build the essential
relationships that would have led each of our teams to cooperate and succeed in delivering to the
customer.

Dr. Steltzner used his example of taking people from different locations that had a competitive
relationship and changed that into one of cooperation. He had 7000 people from 36 countries over
a span of 10 years to meet their business goals. They couldn’t have succeeded without building
relationships. Certainly, this required a lot of effort. They would fly to different locations to meet face
to face if that was an option instead of having a virtual meeting. They would have to be willing to have their ideas figuratively torn to pieces because ideas win, not people.

The corporation exists in the human capital. Keeping that in mind I will be finding ways to appreciate the people that I partner with so we can begin growing our pie instead of fighting over the pieces.